No evidence of biased updating in beliefs about absolute performance: A replication and generalization of Grossman and Owens (2012)

Many studies report that following feedback, individuals do not update their beliefs enough (a conservatism bias), and react more to good news than to bad news (an asymmetry bias), consistent with the idea of motivated beliefs. In the literature on conservatism and asymmetric updating, however, only one prior study focuses on judgments on absolute performance (Grossman & Owens, 2012), which finds that belief updating is well described by the Bayesian benchmark in that case. Here, we set out to test the replicability of these results and their robustness across several experimental manipulations, varying the uncertainty of participants' priors, the tasks to perform, the format of beliefs and the elicitation rules used to incentivize these beliefs. We also introduce new measures of ego-relevance of these beliefs, and of the credibility of the feedback received by participants. Overall, we confirm across various experimental conditions that individuals exhibit no conservatism and asymmetry bias when they update their beliefs about their absolute performance. As in Grossman & Owens (2012), most observations are well-described by a Bayesian benchmark in our data. These results suggest a limit to the manifestation of motivated beliefs, and call for more research on the conditions under which biases in belief updating occur.